Professor Arthur Finch (Chemistry 1950, PhD 1953)

Provided by Peter Gardner

Arthur was born in 1930, the only son of Edith and Robert, and grew up in South Shields.  He came to Imperial College in 1948 and remained there to complete a PhD under F. C. Tompkins.  After I.C., Arthur left for the United States in 1953 where he completed a year’s post-doctoral research at Florida State University, as a physical organic chemist.  This was followed by two year’s research with Herman Schlesinger at Chicago; he was, in fact, Schlesinger’s last post-doctoral student.  This was a pivotal time for Arthur, for he learnt vacuum-handling techniques for the halides and hydrides of boron and phosphorus – many of these compounds and their derivatives were to occupy him in his subsequent career.

Also, at Chicago, Arthur transformed himself from a physical chemist into an inorganic chemist.  This was an astute career move for, at the time, inorganic chemistry was undergoing a renaissance from its erstwhile position as the Cinderella of chemistry – this renaissance was spearheaded on this side of the Atlantic by Wilkinson at IC, Emeleus and Jack Lewis at Cambridge, and Ron Nyholm at UCL.  After Chicago, Arthur retuned to the UK and was of an age where National Service was compulsory.  This he completed as a Pilot Officer in the Education Branch of the RAF – where, he told me, he spent his time teaching boy recruits radiochemistry on the Isle of Man. Then, in 1958, Arthur was appointed to an Assistant Lectureship in Inorganic chemistry at Royal Holloway College (now Royal Holloway, University of London) immediately following his National Service; he was allowed to leave early so as to be in post for the start of term.
 
Apart for periods spent on sabbatical leave, Arthur spent his entire academic career at RHUL and was appointed to a personal chair in inorganic chemistry in the mid-eighties.   Also, during this period, he was conferred with higher doctorates from both London and Khartoum Universities.  He held an adjunct chair at the University of Waterloo, Ontario for eight years.

This rather dry biography does, of course, conceal the man behind it.  So, what was Arthur like to work with at the laboratory bench?  In many ways he was a man of contradiction – he was impatient for results to flow, and this reflects the fact that he was a very ambitious man, and yet, he would spend hours with me, often late into the night, balancing a Wheatstone Bridge with a spot galvanometer and noting down the steadily changing temperature of the calorimeter I was tending.  He wasn’t a man noted for his mechanical skills and it was always with some hesitation you let him too near your apparatus, because, often after a few moments there would be a tinkling of broken glass, as he tried to adjust it.  And yet, he was a skilled self taught glassblower, something that requires good timing, and first class hand-to-eye coordination.
 
Calorimetry was a major strand of Arthur’s research for over twenty years.  During this period he encouraged and nurtured a school of thermochemistry that, ultimately, was second to none in the UK.  It was during this time we had a broad international mix of research students working mainly on boron and phosphorus thermochemistry.  We were fortunate in the 90s to be joined on a part-time basis by Arthur Head, a recently–retired thermochemist from NPL and near-contemporary at I.C., where he was responsible for some outstanding contributions to thermodynamics.  Arthur had, by this stage, developed considerable interest in travel in the Middle East to recruit research students and to encourage a student exchange programme.

He wasn’t afraid to court controversy: I recall at the time of operation Desert Storm in the early 90s, we had, as a research student, an Iraqi major, seconded from the Iraqi Army, working on the thermochemistry of explosives.  I can think of no other colleague who could have got away with that. He was very good at securing funds from the research agencies, a skill which was to stand the group in good stead in the Thatcher years when academic profiles started to be measured in terms of grant income stream rather than, as in the past, in terms of publication record.  I remember he persuaded the MRC to fund a studentship to measure the aqueous solubility of the nitrogen fluorides – I still have great difficulty in recalling the medical relevance of this work.

In parallel with his thermochemistry, he collaborated extensively another colleague, Peter Gates, on spectroscopic methods, particularly Raman spectroscopy, and together they published notable work on the molecular structure of the phosphorus halides and, in particular, the mixed halides.

In the 70s, we set up a collaboration with the Post Office Research Centre, initially at Dollis Hill and latterly at Martlesham Heath.  This was a time when optical fibre communication was in its infancy and there was program at Dollis Hill to make solid state lasers, essentially layered III-V compounds, to drive the fies – this research was headed by a very charismatic man, Marc Faktor, and we worked with him on the optimum conditions for the deposition of semiconductor layers from the gas phase – a technique called Chemical Vapour Deposition.   I think that Arthur recognised a kindred sprit in Marc Faktor, for they were both very smooth operators and got along well.

Unfortunately, the chemistry department at RHUL closed in 1992, leaving Arthur a few years short of formal retirement.  It was in this period that Arthur expanded his overseas travels to foster research collaboration, to undertake examining and to generally act as an ambassador for the college; countries he visited included Egypt, India, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, China, Pakistan, Thailand, Yemen and the Gulf states – he acquired smattering of Arabic during these travels of which he was very proud.   On retirement in 1992, he was granted emeritus status, and was regularly seen at college functions, in the Bourne building at RHUL, always accompanied by an affectionate dog – at least, it was affectionate to most people.

In addition, in his retirement, Arthur worked tirelessly for the charity Greyhounds in Need, which rescues and rehomes greyhounds from all over Europe after their racing days are over.  In this he was assisted by the joint founder of the charity, his second wife, Anne.  He regularly played the organ for the Sunday services at the Wendover Road, Staines, Methodist Church.  He died in August 2007, and is fondly remembered by Anne, three children, and three grandchildren.